The Greatest Gift
by Nubushi
Summary: Yellow goes to see Lance on Christmas Eve. Little does she realize that she has already given him the greatest gift he could ask for. Mangaverse. Grantedshipping (Yellow/Lance) friendshipping.


It was no wonder she had never found the place before, Yellow thought as she walked through the forest, carefully reciting the way there in her mind.

"An early Christmas present," Blue had said with a wink when she told her the directions.

The moon, almost full, lit the ground below, the bare branches of the trees making filigree patterns in the thin layer of snow. It was rare for Viridian to see snow in December. Yellow liked the way that it seemed to deepen the peaceful quiet of the forest, creating a world in which everything was silent except the faint crunch of her boots in the snow. Even the thoughts of the wild pokemon who made the forest their home were quieter than usual, as many of them were curled up in their dens and burrows against the cold.

How long had it been, she wondered, since the battle at Cerise, when she had sent Lance plunging down from the sky with Pika's Megavolt? Seven years? 

Musing on those thoughts, she came to a halt in front of a small cabin near the outskirts of the forest, the side farthest away from any town or route. Evergreens grew thick around it, partially screening it from view, but yellow light shined from the windows, and half-buried footprints in the snow showed it was after the snow started falling that its occupant had last returned. 

Her breath made clouds in the air as she stood still, looking at the cabin, not sure which made her more nervous, the thought what if of what if it weren't really him, or the thought of what if it were. The quiet of the forest made her pulse seem loud in her ears.

Gathering her resolve, she took the last few steps forward to knock on the door.

A pause. The sound of footsteps.

The door opened, and she was looking up into Lance's eyes, which were yellow like molten gold, staring at her with unbroken intensity. Once they had been lit with rage. Now their intensity was something different, which she could not name. 

For only the slightest fraction of a moment, when he first opened the door, those blazing eyes had widened ever so slightly, then narrowed again. He neither smiled nor spoke. 

"Um, hi," she said awkwardly. She could not count how many times she had recited in her mind the thing that she had come to talk about. In all those times, it had never occurred to her to think of what she would say to greet him. "Merry Christmas Eve?" 

He glanced skeptically at the sky behind her, as if the remaining gray tatters of snow clouds, the stars and moon shining through them, would tell him what date it was. 

"What does that have to do with anything?" He asked, folding his arms. 

His reaction at seeing her in his doorway was so deadpan that she wondered if he even recognized her. It had been seven years, after all, since Cerise, where only Blaine had seen her hat swept off to reveal her long, yellow hair. She had only been a child back then, and she wasn't even sure if Lance had ever even found out she was a girl.

"Um ... do you remember me?"

He looked back down at her and raised a single sculpted eyebrow in incredulity—and that, at least, was an expression she recognized. "It's a little hard to forget being hit with a million volts of electricity."

"Right," she said, looking down.

"Yellow, why are you here?" His tone wasn't friendly, but it wasn't overtly hostile, either.

She dug a little hole in the snow with the toe of her boot. "I ..." At least he hadn't turned her away yet, did not interrupt her while she tried to gather her thoughts. "I came because I wanted to apologize to you."

She ventured a glance at his face. Both his eyebrows had skyrocketed upwards in an expression of complete disbelief. "Why after all this time ... no, never mind. I think you'd better start with _what_ you think you have to apologize for."

"Well, you see, like I said back then, I really don't like battling ... so whenever I battle other trainers, I always try to do whatever I can to make sure the pokemon don't get hurt. But I didn't ..." her eyes started to mist as she thought back to it, "I was so determined to do whatever it took to stop you that I didn't think about how to win without hurting you," she ended, her mind filled with images of the thick bolt of lightning falling from the sky, the silhouette of a man tumbling down through the air until his aerodactyl dove and caught him in its claws. Her voice lowered "And, I didn't go back to find out if you were okay. I thought about it, I wanted to, but I ..." Her body tensed up with the shame and the guilt of it, and she found herself blinking back tears, which even the slightest movement of December air brought brimming to her eyes.

It hadn't occurred to her right away. When she had first come to, tucked behind the horns of Red's gyarados, she had been so overcome with joy at being able to meet Red again that there was no room for anything else in her mind. But when that initial wave of joy had subsided a bit, as they neared the mainland, the memory returned unbidden. Lance, whose empathetic pain at the suffering of pokemon had made him lash out in rage like a tauros kicking at the goads. She hadn't wanted to hurt him, only to change his mind, but in the end, there had been no other way. 

She had thought of going back, but she didn't know how. She didn't have pokemon that could surf, and she was doubtful of whether newly-evolved Kitty could carry her that far. And besides that, she had been swept up in the momentum of things—they had all stayed up late into the night together excitedly catching up—and then it had been late, and there had been no good opportunity to slip away, and even if she had, it would likely have been too dark to find him, or so she told herself. The lingering guilt which had kept her up that night, wondering, thinking she really should have gone, had never gone away.

The breeze picked up, and she shivered.

"Yellow, I think you'd better come in and sit down."

She looked up in surprise, her eyes growing round.

"I have something I want to tell you as well."

"I-is it r-really okay?" she asked, teeth chattering. 

"I said, so, didn't I?"

Without waiting for a reply, he turned, and she followed him inside.

He didn't serve her anything—not that she expected him to—but gestured to the table. When they were both seated, he took up the thread of the conversation where they had left off. "It's fine that you didn't come back that time. If you had, I would not have been grateful. But ..." his eyes went distant, recalling scenes from the past. "Bringing life back to the industrial zone ... that was you, wasn't it, channeling Lugia's powers that way?"

She nodded.

"It's ... well, I can't say I felt this way back then, so it's probably a good thing you didn't come find me and try to have this conversation seven years ago." The corner of his mouth turned up in a smirk as his eyes looked into the distance, perhaps recalling his past self—and that expression, too, bore echoes of who he used to be. Then it had been cocky, full of confidence, but now it was a more subtle expression, as if he were sharing a joke with himself that he didn't expect an outsider to understand. "It took me a long time to come to think this way, but ... that was the best thing you could have done for me." 

He brought his gaze back to her. His tone of voice was offhand, as if he hadn't just said something deeply personal, but she felt she could almost sense the hidden emotion somewhere in the back of his eyes, behind his reserve, half wariness and half challenge. _And how will you react to this?_

She wanted him to know that she would never, ever judge him or ridicule him, that to her he was no more her enemy now than any other person, but it was hard to know what to say. "It, um, just seemed the right thing to do," she said modestly. "And I wanted that, too, you know, for the pokemon's habitats to be restored. I also want this to be a world where pokemon can live at peace."

_But even if you restore one habitat, humans will go on polluting and destroying others_. They both knew this was true, but Lance did not say it, perhaps not wanting to shatter this rapprochement, which felt as tentative and fragile as the green sprout of a plant that had just broken through the soil after a long process of pushing itself up through the darkness.

Instead, he said something she had not been expecting at all. "You didn't explain yet what Christmas Eve has to do with all this."

"Oh. Well, I don't understand it very well myself," she said, scratching the back of her head, "but I met a trainer from Unova once who was explaining to me about the origin of Christmas, and it seems like it was based on some sort of legend about some pokemon or person or something who came here to be a part of this earth, this universe, and that had something to do with everyone being able to be forgiven. So it seemed like a good opportunity."

"Everyone?" he raised his eyebrow again. "Doesn't that seem a little naïve?"

"Everyone," she repeated firmly. She reached out across the table—but not to touch him, only to brush her fingers against the outermost edge of his sleeve. "Lance, you know, I ... well, it wouldn't be right to say 'forgave,' because from the beginning, I never held anything against you." She had felt, during their battle, how much of an agony it had been to Lance to live in this world where humans destroy the lives and homes of innocent pokemon. The moment she touched his dragonite to read its thoughts, she had understood all the rage and the resentment of pokemon that Lance had taken upon himself, to act upon those feelings in their place. That was the real reason why he had tried to eradicate humanity. She had lost count of how many times she had called out his name in that battle—all out of a desperate wish to make him understand how wrong his conclusion was.

"I know," he said.

She sat back again, a peaceful smile on her face.

In her mind, everything seemed to connect together, like an infinity loop that turns on itself but is still connected in an unbroken whole. Christmas. Forgiveness. And one other thing. She didn't say it because she didn't want to preach, especially since Lance had already come to understand himself, but her Unova friend also told her about that someone-or-something coming to be in this world even at its most painful—not to erase everything and start over with a clean slate, but to transform it from within, like Lugia had filling the industrial zone that had once been a barren, polluted wasteland with growing things.

Her thoughts shifted abruptly as she suddenly noticed how blank the walls were where she had been directing her gaze without really seeing them. "By the way," she said, sitting up and looking around the room, "Why is your house so dreary? You're supposed to decorate it and make it festive!"

He folded his arms again in indifference.

"What's there to be festive about?"

"All sorts of things!" she said. "For example, humans and pokemon are living together in peace and harmony. Thanks to your efforts, Team Rocket's plans to get a hold of mythical pokemon have repeatedly been stopped. And," she added, her voice softening, "You and I could finally meet and talk like this." She paused for a moment, then "I could bring some decorations tomorrow and decorate for you," she offered, her eyes gleaming enthusiasm.

"Christmas is over tomorrow. You'd just have to take them down again right away."

"It used to be, the celebration of Christmas _started_ on the 25th, so people would put up their Christmas decorations on Christmas Eve and leave them up for a few weeks after that. It's only recently that people started to do the opposite." Her friend had told her a lot of things about Christmas, lamenting about how people in Kanto and Johto didn't understand anything about it. "You haven't had any decorations up yet, so you could look at them for a few days longer, right? So, what if came back on New Year's or sometime to take them down? A week's not too long, is it?"

Lance considered the idea. Despite the intervening years, being around Yellow still stirred up painful memories and emotions. It touched upon a raw spot within him, like something rubbing against newly-healed skin. The sensation was not quite painful, but too sensitive for comfort. On the other hand, he respected her greatly as a trainer and still more for her bond with her pokemon, which was on a level that no one else could even understand.

He closed his eyes briefly, weighing whether it was worth it.

Physically, the distance Yellow had come to visit him tonight was not far—but in reality, her taking that first step was like crossing over an immeasurable abyss. It didn't seem right to refuse to take one small step himself.

"New Year's sounds reasonable," he said experimentally.

He could have sworn that Yellow's eyes were sparkling more than the sparkliest Christmas tree star, ornament, or tinsel. "So I can come?" she asked eagerly.

"All right ... but you have to come back to take them down again, got it?"

Early the next morning, she came as she promised. In a white wool coat, with her golden hair shining in the sunlight, she looked like an angel of peace come on a mission to fill his barren house with greenery. Her eyes were full of joy and her arms full of evergreen boughs and flowers, red and white, whose names he did not know.

Like a birth, that day was only the beginning.

A/N: This story happens about a year after the incident with Petrel impersonating Yellow in the HGSS arc. I am going off of the assumption that Yellow is 11 at the time of the Yellow story arc and Lance is about 6 years older, making her 18 and him about 24 in this story.


End file.
